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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23576311">Gorgon Head</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Becky_Blue_Eyes/pseuds/Becky_Blue_Eyes'>Becky_Blue_Eyes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Tudors (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Child Death, Depression, Disturbing Themes, Eating Disorders, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Medusa as a symbol of protection, very dark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 21:26:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,720</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23576311</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Becky_Blue_Eyes/pseuds/Becky_Blue_Eyes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>And what does he know of grief? Six children she carried, two she bore with breath in their lungs, and only Mary remains. So what does Henry know of grief, of pain, of suffering? Catherine paces, she paces, from the window to her bed to the hearth to where a cradle should be. Her stomach aches. Her vision shifts. The moon yaws. All across England the dark of night shifts its funerary shroud.</p>
<p>Or, a brief exploration of what drives Catherine of Aragon to petition Pope Clement VII for an annulment to her marriage.</p>
<p>Warning: contains explicit descriptions of depression, child death, and eating disorders (anorexia nervosa/anorexia mirabilis)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Anne Boleyn/Henry VIII of England, past Catherine of Aragon/Henry VIII of England</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>88</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Gorgon Head</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Gorgoneion: noun; a representation of a gorgon’s head, often used as a talisman against evil</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Mother, what is that?”</p>
<p>Mary lingers behind the expanse of Catherine’s skirts. Her eyes fix upon the grotesque, the pale serpents curling like ivy around its throat, its brow, the pale emptiness of its eyes. Was Catherine ever so afraid of something as mundane as a statue? Perhaps when the shadows at the Alhambra stretched too long and thin in the echoing corridors. Catherine smiles down at her daughter and strokes her bright auburn hair. “It’s called a gorgoneion, mija. A gorgon’s head. It’s supposed to protect a household from evil.”</p>
<p>“It looks evil,” Mary mutters and Catherine laughs. Mary tugs on her hand; she is six now and thankfully outgrowing the childish habit, but the little strength pulling on her hand pulls at Catherine’s heartstrings as well. “May we walk in the gardens? Please? I wish to see the roses, Papa says there’s red and white roses to make Tudor roses!”</p>
<p>Catherine lets Mary run ahead of her into the sunshine. She hasn’t the strength to run today, as her courses have come and they burn and twist her insides like the man at Tyburn curdling a traitor’s guts with a red iron poke. Yes, they courses come and they go and they come again  and they go again. For all the good they do her, as Henry will not bother to put another child in her womb again. All they do is bring pain.</p>
<p>“Your Majesty?” Catherine turns to see her sister-in-law give her a look. Yes, Mary Brandon is pregnant again, isn’t she? And so is Margaret in Scotland, although Catherine doubts that one will stick either. Bessie’s boy is nearly two now, but it seems just like yesterday her belly swelled up with Henry’s bastard seed while Catherine’s last daughter came to the world cold and purple.</p>
<p>Little Henry Fitzroy.</p>
<p>A son.</p>
<p>Catherine had a son once. Three, in fact. She still feels them sometimes, how they ripped through her to be born in blood and be born of blood, blue blood on both sides of their veins and blue blood stoppering their little blue hearts—</p>
<p>“Your Majesty, are you alright?”</p>
<p>“I fear I am rather melancholic today.” Catherine seats herself at a bench. She’s stopped eating again, for penance and penitence. It’s helped her lose some of her pregnancy weight, at least. She stares at the rich black damask of her dress, she traces the inlaid patterns of black on black, red on red, blue on blue and blue blood in blue hearts…she turns to the Dowager Queen of France and asks, “How are your girls? I’ve asked Henry when to call companions for Mary’s household, but he is rather occupied at the moment.”</p>
<p>He will never make a household for Mary, not when she is his would-be Princess of Wales. He’d never dare admit this is the hand that God saw fit to deal them and Mary is their trump. No, he’d rather find ways to legitimize his bastard. He probably thinks Catherine doesn’t know. But Catherine knows much—every time she lost a child, wisdom grew like weeds in her heart. Catherine shuts her eyes and listens to Mary speak of her daughters and stepdaughters, how Charles’s Anne and Mary are near old enough to be married and how their Frances is ever a charmer and how their little Eleanor has learned a score of new words. How she hopes for a son, as their Henry still aches in their hearts. Yes…Henry died just a few months past…another Henry gone to God to accompany his cousin…</p>
<p>She remembers when her own Mary learned her first words, learned to walk, learned to sing and dance and play. She remembers when her own Henry wrapped his tiny fists around Catherine’s fingers and never let go until a cold wind stole her baby away.</p>
<p>She remembers them all.</p>
<p>Catherine excuses herself to her chambers and entreats her sister-in-law to play with Mary when Catherine cannot. Her ladies in waiting flutter around her, offering her wine and sweetmeats and idle gossip. Her newest lady, Anne Boleyn, offers to play the lute and Catherine allows it. She is a breath of fresh air, this nearly French girl in this nearly Spanish enclave of quiet and stillness. Catherine lies in her bed and listens to the music. If she closes her eyes, the music becomes little voices, five of them, singing to her from the stars.</p>
<hr/>
<p>She doesn’t know what day it is, nor what night. Oh, she hears Mass three times a day and listens to petitions on the throne beside Henry and sews for the poor and gives alms to the poor and…<em>everything, </em>she does everything she must.</p>
<p>She is tired.</p>
<p>It’s night, and Henry’s yelled at her again for her empty womb. She cannot remember the last time he laid with her. And truth be told, she doesn’t want him to. She doesn’t want the sticky wetness of his lips on her skin, the chafing of his cock rubbing her inner parts raw, the letdown of her courses coming and going like the snows in English winter—or worse, the sensation of a life growing within her only to die. Catherine looks down at her stomach, the soft fold of flesh pressing outwards against her sleeping shift.</p>
<p>What a waste of a womb. What a waste of a body. What she would give to become someone else, anyone else. She prods her stomach. A waste, a wasteland, England has proven itself to be a wasteland to her soul and she is the bane of its existence. She wonders what she did to deserve this punishment. Maybe she was born evil? That would explain it, as Catherine must be evil for God to have rescued her children from her before they could draw breath, before they could say their first word…all except Mary. But would that make Mary, her sweet Mary, evil as well, to be born of evil? Perhaps Mary was already cursed—a child of Eve, to bear Eve’s pains and suffering just as her mother and all the mothers before her. Henry will not want Eve’s stain on his gilded throne, not when Adam’s stain already weighs down upon it and cracks the bowed spine of a depleting treasury and discontented commoners.</p>
<p>What did he yell at her about? What that tonight, or the one before? Catherine looks out the window over the gardens. When did the roses wilt? Were they always wilted? A fog envelops her, or a mirage perhaps. When was the last time she ate? When was Mary here last? What day is it…</p>
<p>She is tired.</p>
<p>Catherine stares at the gorgoneion on the wall. It stares back. For a while all she does is stare into its empty eyes, devoid of pupils or irises, just blank marble. She remembers when her last daughter was born and her eyes were open. The blue of her eyes was clouded over until it all seemed the same color. All of her children had those devoid eyes, except for her Henry and her Mary, and now Henry is rotten bone beneath the stars and Mary—her eyes are blue, and one day they will cloud over too, and Catherine will see them, and know she’s killed them, just like the rest—</p>
<p>Catherine screamed when that last child was born dead, screamed and screamed until the foundations of the earth seemed to split beneath her fingernails. But it wasn’t the earth, it was just the bed frame and her palms. Henry kissed her bleeding palms that day, and found his solace in Bessie’s bountiful bed.</p>
<p>She stares at the gorgoneion. Did Medusa’s eyes cloud over when Perseus took her heads from her shoulders? Or did they cloud over when Poseidon raped her, and Athena cursed her for her taint, and all the world wilted to stone around her?</p>
<p>She is tired. What day is it, she must go to Mass soon, surely.</p>
<hr/>
<p>She stares at her plate. Jesus suffered, Jesus did not have roasted boar and potatoes upon a plate of gold with a fine glass of claret to match! Perhaps if Catherine rejects this in penance, Mary will grow up healthy and happy. It cannot hurt to try. She turns away from her food and towards Henry, who is speaking with Mary and Charles Brandon. Anne refills her wine and Henry’s, and doesn’t seem to notice the way Henry’s eyes linger over her. Anne is in love with the Northumberland heir, isn’t she? That won’t stop Henry. It didn’t stop him with Bessie and her husband, nor Mary Boleyn and her husband, nor the laundresses before her former ladies in waiting. Does he think he can fuck a new line of succession? No, Mary is his heir. Catherine won’t…she won’t stand for this…</p>
<p>…she wouldn’t have to if her son had lived, if any of them had lived—</p>
<p>She is going to be sick. She swallows it down and washes her mouth with her wine. The blood of Jesus, but not the body. The blood to match the blood soon to come again between her thighs. Why won’t it stop? It used to stop before, when she was trapped in false widowhood and the old Henry thought to starve out her stubbornness. Is God reminding her not to shirk her duty? Does He want another one of her children? What if she refuses this, and He decides to take Mary instead?</p>
<p>Catherine excuses herself. Henry gives her a look she decodes as sympathetic; he is mercurial, and one moment sympathy turns to cruelty turns to amusement back to pity. “I will come to your chambers later, my wife,” he says. He kisses her knuckles and Catherine doesn’t feel anything other than smothering vertigo. Isn’t that what love is supposed to feel like? Like the world is being swept from your feet?</p>
<p>She sweeps herself to her private closet and properly vomits into her chamber pot. Catherine prays for forgiveness, she weeps and begs God to not take Mary from her on account of her own failings. Then she wipes her eyes and her mouth. She calls for the maids to run her a steaming bath anointed with lemony Castile soap. The scent of home, of the Palace of Alcalá de Henares and its citrus groves, of when Mother used to run her fingers through her hair and tell her that one day God was going to make her Queen of England.</p>
<p>Mother is gone now, and so are Juan and Isabel and Maria. Juana is in a convent, gone mad as the stories say but Catherine knows the truth. No, Juana is not mad, she is just tired of Father’s folly and her husband’s folly and her son’s folly and the folly of all Spain. Catherine is tired too; she dips low into the bath and imagines receding into the waters. They say the womb is made of water too, is this what her children felt within her belly? It is warm. It is so warm, and she can imagine lingering in this one moment for always, safe and suspended in silence.</p>
<p>Then Henry opens the door. And she opens her legs. And later, when she’s brushing out her hair by the hearth, Henry sits up in her bed and says, “Catherine, I must speak with you.”</p>
<p>“What is it, my love?”</p>
<p>He swallows. A rare sign of nerves from him. “I intend to honor my son. Henry Fitzroy.”</p>
<p>She sets down her brush. There are long hairs within its bristles, and in the hearth’s fire light they seem like fire themselves. Strands of fire, wound around the brush and around her own head like a wreath of fire…a wreath of serpents…</p>
<p>“Catherine?”</p>
<p>Catherine used to be called Catalina once. Little Lina, forever toddling behind Juan and Isabel and Maria and Juana and Mama and Papa and all the saints in heaven, only to be left behind here. Left behind, and Catherine has no way to get back.</p>
<p>Henry reaches out and lays his hand on her shoulder. Thank God, the fat has receded there. Now her collarbone is sharp against her skin, and its shadow is like the valley between him and her. Catherine smiles and feels that terrible vertigo again; she must love him. “He is your son,” she hears herself as if from the antechamber. “It is only natural you wish to honor him.”</p>
<p>She decodes relief in his eyes. “Not now, of course, not when things are—things are still new, the time is still young. But by the time he is old enough to understand the gravity of his status, I’ll ennoble him. When he is Mary’s age, maybe.” Catherine nods. He sighs. “I am glad you are reasonable about this, Catherine. I…I dare not question God, but we have suffered much in our marriage bed. I still remember our little Hal…”</p>
<p>He weeps for his lost son. <em>His</em> lost son, she hears the inflection. And his weeping turns to yelling, his grief turns to rage. It washes over her like incense at Mass, like sunlight in the gardens. It’s her fault his children are dead. She’s done something wrong. She’s something wrong. She cannot know of his grief, of his pain, as she is the source of it.</p>
<p>Henry storms out. Her ladies slowly file back into her room, and she sees pity in their eyes. She sees fear in Anne’s, as Anne must surely feel the weight of his gaze upon her as it weighed upon her sister Mary’s. Mary has a child, doesn’t she? Perhaps two? Catherine smiles.</p>
<p>Sometime later, Catherine doesn’t know when, she brushes her hair again. Her ladies sleep on the pallets around her bed, but it’s easy to slip past them and only rustle the fragrant rushes upon the floor.</p>
<p>She stares out the window. She stares into the hearth. She stares at the gorgoneion. Her brush nearly slips from her fingertips but she sets it on her table with exquisite care. Then she pulls a handful of her hair out with the same care, pinch by pinch. Ah, she remembers this from before. Maybe this time it won’t grow back, and all the world shall know her to be a sinner. Catherine drinks the leftover wine. The fire flickers, and slowly does her own.</p>
<p>…and what does he know of grief? Six children she carried, two she bore with breath in their lungs, and only Mary remains. So what does Henry know of grief, of pain, of <em>suffering?</em> Catherine paces, she paces, from the window to her bed to the hearth to where a cradle should be. Her stomach aches. Her vision shifts. The moon yaws. All across England the dark of night shifts its funerary shroud.</p>
<hr/>
<p>The gorgoneion is meant to protect her from evil. She commissions a smaller version, one to fit within a locket, and carries it around with her. It gives her a new balance when her own balance shifts and falters with every skipped meal. Sometimes she must lie down and wakes up after a minute, a moment, an entire half-day. Her ladies beseech her to eat, as do the physicians and dear Thomas More and even her husband. But Catherine cannot eat. Not until Mary is safe.</p>
<p>And Mary is not safe.</p>
<p>There are whispers, rumors even, of Henry finding fault in his marriage to her. And why wouldn’t he? How many children have they buried? Catherine grips her stomach. She can feel another child growing, and God will take this one too. Mary must be Queen of England by default, as Mary and Charles’s son will surely go to God as well. They can’t have Scotland taking the throne. It must be Mary, yet Henry finds fault in Catherine, he finds fault in her. Their daughter. Her daughter! Her only living daughter!</p>
<p>Catherine wonders if her marriage is cursed. She wonders if it’s as evil as she must be. She goes to Cardinal Wolsey, as he is the only priest who can take a queen’s confession in some semblance of confidence. She doesn’t want to weep, but she does. She weeps, because that is her enemy on the other side of the confession grille, and God is going to take this baby in her belly and take her daughter too and Catherine can do nothing because she is nothing…she is nothing but evil…</p>
<p>“You are not evil,” the cardinal says. “You are a good woman with grief upon your shoulders. Let your grief go, and find acceptance in God.”</p>
<p>“But how can I?” she asks. “I’ve cursed my marriage!” She clasps at her gorgoneion in her locket.</p>
<p>“You cannot curse a marriage you entered in good faith and have been true and faithful to. God’s will is not ours to question.”</p>
<p>Catherine sits in the gardens later. The roses red and white have been replaced by the daylilies orange. Orange lilies are not good omens, she remembers. An omen not of love, but of hate. She squeezes the locket and remembers the serpents. The glazed over eyes. The rape and the wrath, the evil curse upon that one woman who did nothing but try to entreat her gods for protection, who remained in that cave until someone came to kill her. She ponders that mystery of the gorgon’s severed head. She ponders the mystery of her dead children and the ones yet to die.</p>
<p>She ponders her marriage.</p>
<p>The nights blend into the days and the funerary shrouds meld with her skirts until everything is but one and the same.</p>
<p>Catherine ponders. Catherine stares. Catherine tires. Catherine withers. Catherine, Catherine, <em>Catherine</em>…Catherine is.</p>
<p>Sometime later, when Henry’s off on a hunting trip and the court is lingering in Placentia’s blissful quiet, Catherine goes to Cardinal Wolsey again. Not as a supplicant, but as a queen, and as a queen haunted by shadows long and thin in every footstep. “In the years leading up to my marriage with His Majesty,” she asks in the orchards full of autumn fruit, “did he entertain any offers with other women? Any at all?”</p>
<p>The cardinal stares at her. She stares at him. She decodes the cycles of his corrupt mind going to good use; she decodes a hint of fear and wonders what her face looks like now. Death itself, perhaps. It matters not. What matters is why her marriage is rotten—she did not sleep with Arthur, unless he decided to bed her in her sleep! So why does God find fault with her?</p>
<p>
  <em>Why did God take her children from her?!</em>
</p>
<p>It takes months to find out. She must write to her nephew and cajole him with promises of asking Henry to help him fight off the next wave of Turks and Frenchmen and whoever else. She must bribe the cardinal with more influence than is comfortable to give. But eventually, they find it: a pre-contract between Henry and Eleanor of Austria, the Dowager Queen of Portugal. Her own niece. Never officially signed on the old Henry’s part, and Henry himself could easily disavow it as he petitioned the Pope directly for a dispensation to marry Catherine…</p>
<p>Catherine smiles. The skin on her face stretches until her lips bleed, and she calls a maid. She asks for a platter of fruit for herself and the cardinal. She eats the fruit and doesn’t mind the tears burning down her cheeks to drip onto the plate of silver. Later she stares out the window over the orchards towards the ocean beyond the horizon.</p>
<p>She is tired.</p>
<p>She is so tired.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Her messenger leaves with a painstakingly and lovingly created copy of the contract, and Catherine eats fruit. Strawberries mostly, but also oranges and apples. When Mary the sister and Mary the daughter ask her, she even eats manchet bread. She hears Mass seven times a day until her knees bruise on the stone floors and gives a quarter of her total pin money to the poor. The rest she secrets away. She will need it.</p>
<p>Her daughter must be queen, but even if it cannot be, she will protect her darling girl. The only girl she was ever allowed to keep—Catherine does not trust the infant in her womb to live and doesn’t think of it. If she does, she will cry, and she will scream and slam her head against the walls until something gives. She cannot do that, not yet. Not until the messenger returns with the Pope’s answer for her petition.</p>
<p>She writes to Juana, officially in flowing black script and truly in lemon ink on the margins of her letters. She asks of her sister, and Juana asks of her, and the commiserate over their exhaustion. Of how Catherine still cannot eat more than a handful of fruit a day without feeling shame choke her silent, of how Juana vomits every day for the sake of piety. Juana calls her Catalina and Catherine’s heart sings. Sometimes Mary is with her when she writes, and plays the virginals for her, and her voice is as sweet as spring.</p>
<p>Everything Catherine does, she does for this little girl. She knows now that this is her destiny. Not to be Queen of England; she’s done that and it’s brought her naught but suffering. No, her destiny is Mary. Mary, Mary, her little Maria, she will defy God’s plan and keep her safe. Safe from Henry, safe from her nephew, safe from the cold winds that stopper a babe’s blue heart with blue blood.</p>
<p>Catherine stares into the gorgoneion in her locket and its eyes. She realizes she was wrong before, as there are irises in those eyes. She peers closer, until her eye presses against it and smears her vision across the delicate carving. She sees blue eyes, blue as summer; Mary’s eyes, Mother’s eyes.</p>
<p>She wonders what Henry sees when the messenger returns with Pope Clement VII’s official response. She watches his face: confusion as he’s never sent a petition, shock as he reads the message; shockoutragefury—</p>
<p>He jumps to his feet and screams at her in front of all the court, “You’ve made a mockery of me!”</p>
<p>They are annulled. By the grace of God’s voice on earth, the marriage between Catherine and Henry is and was nevermore. Mary remains his heir and a legitimate princess, as is the prospective child in her womb, as it was never Catherine’s fault. She entered a marriage in good faith, and Henry—Henry had a <em>pre-contract. </em>They are annulled, and Catherine is freed from the marriage that’s taken all her joys and her youth and left her five dead children. Henry savages her that night, beating her and ripping out her hair and spitting in his wrath. But he doesn’t dare to kick her stomach, even though she decodes how he desperately craves to smash her insides open like a ripe pumpkin.</p>
<p>She smiles at him, and he freezes. What does he see in her face with her bloodied lips and her sallow skin and her eyes—what does he see in her eyes? Henry is like petrified stone and Catherine laughs. She shrieks her laughter. “It was never I who lost our children, my so-called husband! It was you! <em>You!”</em> She rises and throws herself at him and he skitters away like Perseus finally rejected and defeated by Medusa. “Five children God took from me! Five children of my flesh and blood! Now but two remain, and surely this child too shall be born dead!” Catherine raves, throwing herself about her room and dancing until all her hair is serpents and all her nails are talons and all her flesh is scales. Look upon her! Look upon her! “You cannot hurt me anymore, Henry! God has judged me, and God has saved me! I am freed!” Henry begs her to stop and Catherine doesn’t. He quails, he weeps, and Catherine triumphs.</p>
<p>They whisper of Catalina la Loca the next day and the next day and all the days after that. Catalina la Loca, and Catherine the Wronged, and Henry the Fool. It bothers Catherine not, as she packs her belongings to leave for her dower land in Devon. Henry is generous and gives her a great castle in those rosy southern hills along with half a dozen others, a pension nearly as large as her annual allowance as anointed queen, and lets Mary stay with her as long as Catherine remains a loyal subject. Mary who he cannot look at and who cannot look at him from behind the expanses of Catherine’s skirts. Perhaps he is relieved to be freed of that miserable farce as she is. Maybe he can marry Bessie after having her husband done away with and legitimize their bastard. Maybe he can marry Anne who still mourns for her own Henry. Catherine cares not.</p>
<p>No, all she cares about is that Mary is safe. She is a princess, she is legitimate, she will stay with Catherine—her daughter will not be taken by God now that Catherine’s absolved herself of her false marriage.</p>
<p>God will not take Mary.</p>
<p>He won’t.</p>
<p>He can’t.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Catherine gives birth to another daughter. The babe opens her pale blue eyes, and cries for breath, and keeps crying. Catherine clutches at the gorgon’s head in her palm and weeps until all the blue blood leaves her body and the funerary shroud lifts up and her heart is filled with blessed, blessed<em> light.</em></p>
<hr/>
<p>…the two daughters of Catherine of Aragon, Duchess of Devon-Somerset and former Queen of England (1485-1550), eventually became queens in themselves. Raised by their loving mother to be intelligent and fiercely self-confident, they had far happier marriages than their parents. Princess Mary (1516-1589) married Enrique I of Portugal (1512-1580), as according to popular legend he forsook taking holy orders when he accompanied his family on a visit to England and danced with her at a masque, the two falling instantly in love. They had three children, a son Enrique II (1536-1626) and two daughters Catarina, Duchess of Lorraine (1542-1620) and Isabel, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (1546-1630), and their union narrowly avoided the collapse of the Portuguese throne succession and kept Portugal independent from an overreaching Spain.</p>
<p>Princess Johanna (1523-1591) married Sigismund II of Poland (1520-1572), narrowly winning his hand over her relative Elizabeth of Austria. They had three children, two sons Aleksander II (1541-1610) and Kazimierz Prince-Bishop of Warmia and Krakow (1545-1600) and a daughter Zophia Katarzyna, Archduchess of Austria (1550-1624). This union too narrowly avoided the end of the Jagiellonian dynasty in Poland and Lithuania. Johanna befriended her husband’s mistress Barbara Radziwill and the two were inseparable; they were even rumored to share the royal marriage bed together even when the king was not present, although this rumor was mainly spread by Sigismund II’s detractors.</p>
<p>King Henry VIII (1491-1547) remarried Lady Anne Boleyn, Marquess of Pembroke (1501-1561), in 1525 after a whirlwind courtship. Multiple sources state that the Duchess of Devon-Somerset herself encouraged her former husband to marry then-Lady Anne and to finally find some semblance of happiness. They had five children, Edward VI (1526-1560); William, King of Scotland (1530-1590); Elizabeth, Queen of Denmark (1533-1603); Anne, Princess of Orange (1537-1583); and Catherine, Queen of Sweden (1537-1610). Through these dynastic matches, Tudor blood runs through the veins of modern monarchs and prime ministers to this day.</p>
<p>Henry VIII is known mainly for his religious tolerance during the Counter-Reformation, a tolerance which is now known to have been the influence of Queen Anne. One may wonder what England’s future would have been had the Duchess of Devon-Somerset not seen it fit to petition Pope Clement VII for an annulment of what she described as “a wasteland of a marriage”. What is known for sure is the extensive correspondence between the Duchess and the Queen, mainly dealing with their children and shared charity projects along with spirited religious debate, that suggests a friendship between the two that certainly could not have existed had Queen Anne come between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. When Catherine died, Queen Dowager Anne was one of her chief mourners along with all the Tudor children come home to lay the woman to rest…</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So that went to some pretty dark places. But considering how terrible it must have been to miscarry four pregnancies and have an infant die at less than a year old, I can imagine Catherine of Aragon’s mind went to dark places.</p>
<p>Medusa’s severed head has been described as one of the greatest symbols of feminine rage and grief, and in modern times feminist theory reclaimed the legend of Medusa as a sort of empowerment. Medusa was raped and reviled and blamed for her suffering, but then with her petrifying gaze she was given the power to never be victimized again (until that prick Perseus came along and cut off her head, yet another victimization of a woman who wished to be left alone). There is a power to Medusa and the symbol of the gorgon head that I have Catherine in this story draw upon and it gives her the strength to walk away from the marriage that is making her a victim of rage and grief.</p>
<p>The historian Giles Tremlett theorized that Catherine of Aragon suffered from an eating disorder, as at one point Pope Julius sent a missive saying that if “the devotions and fasting of the wife” were “thought to stand in the way of her physical health and the procreation of children” then they could be “revoked and annulled by men.” I took that theory and ran with it, using some of my own unfortunate experience with anorexia nervosa to flesh out the historical description of anorexia mirabilis. That’s how St. Catherine of Siena died by the way; by the end of her life she was eating one (1) communion wafer a day.</p>
<p>Henry VIII was at one point in talks to marry Eleanor of Austria, but it never went anywhere and he married Catherine instead. However in this AU, those talks amounted to a pre-contract and Catherine used it as her excuse to annul her awful tragic marriage. It was fun to write Henry being the one divorced ignobly in between me muttering “Is this overly dark?” and “This is not nearly dark enough.”</p>
<p>But in the end, as my Tudor AUs tend to do, it worked out in the end. Catherine got to raise two living daughters who became queens, Henry and Anne married and had a bunch of kids who weren’t ever bastardized or threatened with treason, two succession crises got averted and I’m pretty sure I just butterflied away a couple more succession snarls down the line with fresh Tudor blood, Catherine and Anne became friends by the very end…if only Catherine could’ve chosen to leave her marriage with dignity and power instead of clinging to it beyond hope. Who knows what could’ve happened.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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